How to pay off those ! traffic tickets in a few easy steps
by kidamaroo
Summary: When Joni gets a bunch of undeserved traffic tickets, she finds an...interesting way to pay them off.
1. Chapter 1

On paper, this will sound like the ultimate dick move. It'll sound like me taking out my problems on the innocent meatheads that take metal shop. I'm not a passive aggressive person by nature, but I'm not above doing something like this, especially when I don't have any other options.

It all started with a wad of traffic tickets. I got the traffic tickets by doing something perfectly normal: _hiking_. Can. You. Imagine? Getting a wad of traffic tickets for hiking?! It makes absolutely _zero_ sense. But, it happened to me. It was wrong, but it happened. I got traffic tickets for _hiking._ Eight of them, actually: Driving with no seat belt, driving with no license, driving while underage, no insurance, no lights, no mirrors, no plates, and no doors. Yes, really. No _doors_. I wasn't even _in a car!_

I could have easily fought them, too. After all, I wasn't written up by an officer; they caught me on a traffic camera. I could have argued that the camera was not functioning properly (since it's designed to catch cars running through red lights, not hikers sprinting across the crosswalk); and that the tickets were sent in error. Except, my dad told me that fighting the tickets was not an option. He didn't care _why_ I got them, he made it very clear that _we would not be fighting those tickets._ I would pay them off, regardless of whether or not I deserved them. So that meant I was stuck with $600 in undeserved traffic tickets and my dad would _not_ bail me out! Unbelievable. None of this was right! I was so upset, I cried myself to sleep that night.

The following morning at school, I had an idea: Mr. Mandelsson, the metal shop teacher, has been both losing his hearing and cracking down on swearing (and a lot of people think it's about time - the guys in metal shop swear like their lives depend on it). My plan was simple, like the guy that sits in front of me in last period Spanish. Unlike my friend from last period Spanish, the plan worked. My plan to get $600 in a reasonable amount of time: put a swear jar in the metal shop classroom. The fee for swearing was $1.00, with a 40% surcharge for swearing in a language other than English (because trust me, people will try that when faced with a swear jar). I figured that with that in place, I'd have enough money to pay the fine in about a week. The people in metal shop swear frequently, and (as I've mentioned), Mandelsson is going deaf; and consequently, has bit of a tendency to ding people for swearing when they really weren't. Now that I mention it, maybe that's the reason they swear for real so often.

However; a funny thing happened. Turns out, Mr. Mandelsson is losing a little _more_ than his hearing. I think his eyesight is going down the tube, because he kept misreading the label on the swear jar that says "$1.00 charge for cursing" as "$100 charge for cursing" and charged accordingly. Well, to make a long story short, I had enough money to pay the fines by the end of the day.

And after that, the swear jar was gone. It vanished as quickly as it arrived. Nobody could figure out where it came from (typical metal shop students…too dumb to figure out I put it there!) I paid the traffic tickets, and went on with my life no more worse for wear (if not a _little_ disgusted at the city for giving me traffic tickets for hiking.) Everything went back to normal right?

Wrong. This was the point where things were just started to go wacko. It's always when you think it's settling down, isn't it? Things always get out of hand the minute you think they're settling down. That said, my definition of out of control is a little different than everyone else's. When most people say something is out of control, they clearly haven't seen anything yet. Seriously, most people would have called it in after getting traffic tickets for hiking. I didn't register "out of control" until now.


	2. Chapter 2

You'd be amazed about how much can happen in three weeks: shop teachers can retire, houses can be sold; and people can file lawsuits regarding mysterious swear jars with a 40% surcharge for cursing in a foreign language that suddenly appear in shop class.

From what I gather, a day or two after I got the traffic tickets paid, someone complained about the swear jar in the shop classroom. They weren't the only ones to complain. A bunch of parents got pretty steamed about the swear jar, too. They thought it was Mr. Mandelsson who put the swear jar in the classroom. Worse, they thought that the fee posted on the swear jar really was $100 (it was actually $1; Mr. Mandelsson just misread the amount). Long story short, he wound getting hit with accusations of unduly extorting money from his students. The fact that there was a 40% surcharge for using cuss words in a language other than English hurt his case even more. As a result, a bunch of parents filed a lawsuit against the school. Ultimately, the suit was settled; with the condition that Mr. Mandelsson retire immediately. Anyway, one of the consequences of Mr. Mandelsson's retirement is that metal shop is discontinued. Anyone who was originally taking metal shop has now been placed in physics. I know the metal shop guys are all taking physics because the school is forcing Santiago to tutor them. He's _not_ happy about it.

To be honest, I didn't think Mandelsson would retire as a result of that stupid swear jar. I didn't think all those kids taking metal shop would wind up taking physics (because, let's face it, they're a little hollow between the ears). I'm not surprised that Santiago has to tutor them all. Frankly, I'd be more surprised if the metal shop guys were smart enough to get through physics _without_ Santiago's assistance. I mean, some of those guys in metal shop were stick-a-fork-in-an-outlet dumb. In fact, I actually feel bad for Santiago. Imagine being a genius who's struggling to impart his knowledge of the very laws that govern our universe to a bunch of people who have the same intellectual capabilities as a sea star. Sadly, I'm not exaggerating. One of the kids that Santiago tutors tried to eat as many syrup packets as he could without barfing. If I recall correctly, he ate about 17 before he fired off the highest viscosity vom of all time. Another had tried to convince him that a raspberry was half blueberry and half strawberry. Unfortunately, he was 100% serious. And a third tried to demonstrate that he was invulnerable to fire (which he wasn't, by the way).

You might think it's not really that bad, right? I mean, maybe Santiago was exaggerating. Nope. He wasn't. If he were, he wouldn't have called me at 2 AM. Trust me, I will never forget that phone call.

Santiago: Joni, what did I do to deserve this? I should be trying to develop methods to synthesize new element of the periodic table, not showing Preston Selfridge how to draw a free body diagram properly. I'm not kidding; the first couple of times I asked him to draw an FBD, he drew a naked woman!

Me: Santiago, it's 2 in the morning. Can we _please_ talk about this when we're both, y'know, actually _awake?!_

Santiago: I tried to explain to him that it wasn't correct, but he said that it was because it was a diagram of a woman who's very free with her body! I swear, I can feel my IQ dropping when I'm around these guys!

Me: Well, you're pretty smart, Santiago. You'll figure out a way to deal with them.

Santiago: You have no idea, Joni! These morons are interfering with my work, they're interfering with my sleep..

Me: Yeah, and they're interfering with _my_ sleep, too. Go to bed!

Santiago: I'm beginning to suspect that this whole deal with stuffing the metal shop idiots in physics and forcing me to tutor them is some kind of revenge for…

Me: I am _serious_ , Santiago! Go. The. Hell. To. _Sleep!_

The next morning, Santiago figured out how to deal with the imbeciles he had to tutor: he fobbed 'em off to Leslie! That way, he doesn't have to tutor them anymore. Personally, I think he just made the problem worse. Mark my words, Leslie is going to have an even _worse_ time trying to teach those idiots than Santiago ever did.


	3. Chapter 3

Sometimes it's hard to see that little things you do in the present can have large consequences in the future. It's hard to anticipate metal shop getting cancelled because the teacher got in trouble for something related to your actions. It's even harder to anticipate one of your friends having to bring the dumbass kids from metal shop up to speed. It's harder still to anticipate that friend sloughing off his responsibilities to another friend, who then goes crazy. Long story short; thanks to Santiago's decision to make Leslie tutor the idiots in metal shop, Leslie had a nervous breakdown.

Part of me wanted to laugh. I mean, when you hear someone say that something (in this case, the sheer stupidity of the idiots in metal shop) drives someone crazy, it's usually a figure of speech. In this case, the sheer stupidity of the guys in metal shop actually _did_ drive someone crazy. Yet, at the same time, I felt awful. I mean, this was my friend. Leslie had always been so calm, cool, and collected. The fact that she was running around in a bathrobe, a bikini, flippers, and a pair of underwear on her head; handing out rue to strangers on the street and instructing them to wear it with a difference made me uneasy. It was almost like those dumdums from metal shop were so stupid that they broke her brain.

I should have known that Santiago would stick Leslie with those idiots. He always does that with stuff he doesn't want to do; he gets Leslie to do it for him. It never ends well. He's done this countless times while we were on our missions, and it almost always ends in failure. I literally have too many examples to list. Santiago fobbed off his jobs to Leslie so often - and things would get so screwed up as a result - that it was a wonder we solved any mysteries at all!

This is different. School is not like that; school does not work that way. While Santiago may have had the benefit of doing AP physics (yes, despite being a ninth grader. You'd be surprised how common that is), Leslie has not. Yes, Leslie skipped fourth grade (she's in 8th grade now). Yes, she has read a lot of physics books. None of that makes her able to effectively tutor the imbeciles who were formerly taking metal shop. Just because you read a lot about physics doesn't necessarily mean you can magically guess what's going to be covered in the physics class at school. Physics is a story, and that story has a lot of parts. Some parts of the story are simple enough for most of us to grasp at the K-12 level (like kinematics and Newton's Laws of Motion), and some are not (like general relativity). If you're teaching physics, you have to cover a lot of concepts (and repeat them!) in a relatively short time frame. Obviously, some stuff is going to get left behind. Also, physics is 25% concepts and 75% problem solving (a fact that my cousin learned the hard way when _she_ did physics). Not only that, Leslie hasn't really been exposed to the kinds of problems you'd encounter if you take physics in high school, and thus hasn't developed an approach to solve them. Most of the physics problems she's had experience solving are the kind where you read a couple paragraphs in the textbook and regurgitate what you've read on a worksheet. High school level physics problems actually require you to understand what you're reading, and apply that to the task at hand. You're at the point where you're just starting to translate what's actually happening into math. Leslie has a good grasp of the physics concepts, but her math skills (which is what you need to solve physics problems) are...woeful, to say the least. She doesn't have the same set of physics-related skills that Santiago has. Basically, this means she's still learning the material herself _and_ teaching a bunch of numbskulls at the same time. Between all of that, Leslie isn't really in a good position to tutor those guys. It gets worse when you realize that there are jellyfish out there that are smarter than the people she's tutoring. Leslie losing her marbles because of Santiago fobbing off his responsibilities to her was pretty much inevitable.

Santiago should know by now how serious his little habit of making Leslie do his dirty work really is. The stakes here are higher than they were when we were solving our mysteries. The grades of the doofuses that used to be in metal shop got worse (something I didn't even think was possible) because of this. _Leslie's_ grades have become a mess because of this. Between that and the nervous breakdown, a bunch of people at her school have decided that maybe it would be best for her to go to a special school for kids with mental problems. I hope you're happy, Santiago. Your pathetic course of action just cost me one of my friends, and with Leslie out of the picture; you're going to have to do your own dirty work.


	4. Chapter 4

Oh. My. GOD. Did the whole thing with the swear jar ever blow up in my face or what?!

With Leslie gone, there was nobody to tutor the metal shop guys; and consequently, their grades have just dropped like a stone. Not surprisingly, their parents complained to the school that their precious little hairballs were getting F's left, right, and center. Someone traced everything back to the school getting rid of metal shop. Then, they went to speak to Mr. Mandelsson about why he put a swear jar with such a high fee in the metal shop classroom. Not only did he admit to misreading the fee on the swear jar, he mentioned that he had no idea who put the swear jar there. One thing led to another, and somebody (maybe Santiago, but I'm not 100% sure) told Mr. Mandelsson that I put the swear jar in the metal shop classroom.

Great. Now Mr. Mandelsson is just _livid_. He "confiscated" (read: stole) my glasses and he won't give them back to me unless I apologize for getting him in trouble with the school and costing him his job. It really pisses me off that he chose to take my glasses. His logic was that, because my eyesight is 20/250 with my glasses and 20/300 without them, the glasses are a cosmetic thing and therefore a "reasonable" thing to hold hostage. What does that mean? Does that mean that because I'm legally blind, my glasses are considered a cosmetic thing? Granted, the difference between 20/250 eyesight and 20/300 eyesight doesn't sound like much, but for me; it's the difference between being able to read large print and having to read Braille (I actually prefer Braille over large print, but that's another story). It's the difference between nice, readable handwriting and God-awful caveman scratches. It's the difference between whether or not my socks match. In all fairness, though; I don't need to use a white cane to not walk into things. I can see a little bit. But I won't be able to golf or anything like that without my glasses, so that kind of sucks.

Mr. Mandelsson doesn't want me to just call him and say, "Hey I'm sorry about the swear jar. I put the swear jar there to pay off a bunch of BS traffic tickets that I got for hiking. I've paid them now, and everything has more or less calmed down on my end. No hard feelings?" (Of course not. That'd make things way too easy!) Nope. I've got to write a 6 page, double spaced, 3600 word letter explaining to him as to why I put the swear jar in his classroom, and about why I hate my life because of my actions, and all that other crap; and I have to bring it over to his house.

Sure enough, I wrote a 6 page, 3600 word apology letter to Mr. Mandelsson. All the apologetic stuff was in the first paragraph. The rest was just random crap to make the word count and the page limit check out. Seriously, the second sentence of the fourth paragraph was literally "That last sentence is _maybe_ a real sentence, maybe not." All the important stuff was in the first paragraph, kind of like how Owen Lam writes a book report. I know; I've had to read over his school work. I know how he writes. Now that I mention it, maybe that's what I was thinking of when I decided how I was going to write the letter.

Now, I thought I had the apology letter under control. My dad read it, and he begged to differ. He said I needed to start over and write a real apology letter.

After I (begrudgingly) got started with my new letter, Ursula (my cousin) found it. I kind of wished she didn't, because I got the biggest surprise of my life when she found it.

Ursula: Did you actually stick a swear jar in the metal shop room at your school?

Me: Yeah

Ursula: Was that to pay off those tickets you got for hiking?

Me: How did you know?!

I hadn't said a word to Ursula about the tickets, the swear jar, the fact that each and every one of those doughheads in metal shop had to take physics because metal shop was discontinued. I kind of wish I'd mentioned _something_ about those idiots to her. She could've at least given them her little speech about how physics is a story. If she had, they would actually understand physics and wouldn't be failing.

Ursula: Apparently, a bunch of people (and a couple of horses) were issued these nonsensical traffic tickets.

Me: The city gave a traffic ticket to a _horse?_

Ursula: Yeah, but that's beside the point. You do realize those tickets you got for hiking were fake, right? I mean, they had "City of Sam Hose" written on them.

Me: Seriously?

Ursula: Seriously. If they were real, then they would neither be misspelled nor would they have "Like us on Facebook!" written on the bottom. You'd have to stick your head in a bucket to miss that.

Me: Slow down, what? Those tickets were _fake?!_

So, after all that, those stupid tickets weren't even real. I ruined Leslie and Santiago's lives with a dumb decision so I could get $600 to pay nonexistent traffic tickets! I don't even… I can't believe… what … the… asdfghjklpoiuytrewqzxcvbnm…

… _WHAT!?_


End file.
